Deus Ex: Invisible War Review

These few inconsistencies in weapon design can also be applied to the game's rather lopsided difficulty. Once your character becomes sufficiently Biomoded it will be powerful enough to handle any type of situation with brawns instead of stealth. Through a good portion of the game the stealth option is completely unnecessary. As I said, things do get trickier near the end of the game, where a few stealthier approaches might be in order, but I just got a feeling that the difficulty balance was slightly off for the better part of the single-player. This wouldn't be too significant if it wasn't for the fact that it kind of limited the gameplay to a certain more aggressive and straightforward approach. Then again, I've played the game on the normal level of difficulty. I guess upping the difficulty setting should make things just right for those of you looking for more of a challenge. Furthermore, the mere fact that you'll want to explore your surroundings and "find a better way" will ensure that you never go through the entire game all guns blazing.

The AI code worked pretty well most of the time. Aside from a few minor path finding issues, it proved to be sufficiently environmentally aware and believable enough not to impede the consistency of the game world. Granted, the CPU opponents had a few more minor flaws in their behavior, but we aren't talking about anything that would lower the overall score or significantly influence my overall impression of the gameplay.

Finally, those of you who've played the demo are certainly already aware of the many visual discrepancies that were directly related to this game being largely optimized for the Xbox. On the other hand, when you turn off the Bloom effect, and max out the PC effects, the game can look pretty good. The fusion of the highly interactive game environment with solid lighting and dynamic shadows makes the game world seem gritty enough to convey the atmosphere of a gloomy post-apocalyptic life. As I said, with some proper visual tweaking the textures can be made to look sharp and the models will appear detailed and very realistic. Of course, the implementation of the rag doll physics and the excellent skeletal animation system only helps in those regards. The environments might at times look rather too simplistic, but the abovementioned effects ensure that the general impression remains fairly positive.

However, all this doesn't in the least bit justify the very steep hardware requirements. I played the game on a AMD 3GHz/Radeon 9700PRO (3.9 CATALYST)/1GB 400MHz RAM rig and was really frustrated on a couple of occasions by the extremely choppy frame rates. I had to turn off FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing), and play in the modest 1024x768 resolution, and the game still wouldn't run fine when all the other details were maxed out. Warren Spector commented on the system reqs in a post to the Ion Storm forums and said that the game requires a card with an extremely high fill rate. What this means is that, to be able to play this one in a truly high-resolution (say 1600x1200), you'd have to have a beast of a machine the likes of which cannot be purchased today. To top it all off, the game requires Pixel Shaders 1.1, an advanced 3D feature that's not even supported by the MX line of NVIDIA cards. I guess it's rather unfair that so many gamers running lower-end gaming systems would be left out to dry like that. Again, I'm suspecting this has something to do with the Xbox optimization as the Bloom effect, that's supposed to soften the edges of polygons and give lights a special glow, looks like it was primarily intended to look good in TV resolutions. Hence, the rather low-res appearance of the textures when this option is turned on.

My sentiments on the audio experience were largely positive. Certain sounds in the environment are properly accented to give a special sense of immersion to the player. Contrary to this, voice acting is rather inconsistent. The actors do a good job for the most part, but there were a few NPC's whose voices sounded very amateurish and flat. Another minor gripe I had with the audio has to do with the digital remastering of the voices. Often during conversation characters would make unnaturally long pauses between sentences. This kind of makes it obvious that the dialogue has been cut and pasted together. Usually this would happen when the character pauses during speech to highlight an important moment in the conversation. The musical soundtrack is excellently incorporated into the gameplay. It represents a mix of cyber punk and hard rock tunes and it's perfectly suited for the game's prevailing mood.

For better of worse, certain things about Deus Ex: Invisible War hold very true. The game has been optimized with consoles in mind. Then again, Ion Storm has to be commended for being able to pull off such a highly complicated project and for yet again pushing the limits of game design - in terms of story telling, the implementation of physics in regards to the gameplay, and the ability to create an illusion of choice for the player. From a PC gamer's standpoint, it's clear that Invisible War still has room for improvement - mostly in the technical department. It's hampered with a number of issues that originally wouldn't have existed if only the game was designed with the PC in mind. But even as it is, Deus Ex: Invisible War is an intelligent, mature and engrossing project that deserves the attention of every self-respecting shooter/adventure game fan out there. I would be a total hypocrite if I didn't award it for its strong points that I hold in such high regard.